The spirit of the place
seemed to be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its
breath to number my footfalls. One could not help feeling that there
ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
soon come pattering through the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in
such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of the
open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon the
slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at
some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be
walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller, and
change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward, and
so shift my point of view.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the
wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and
gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream.
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